Speaker: Professor Gordon Baym

University of Illinois at Urbaba-Champaign, USA

Title: Superfluidity

This series of lectures will cover fundamentals of superfluidity. Starting with a general overview of the many manifestations of superfluidity, it will go on to discuss phenomenological and microscopic descriptions of superfluidity. Topics to be covered include superfluidity in liquid helium, ultracold atoms, nuclei, neutrons stars, and quark-gluon plasmas.

Time:

April 3, Tuesday 2:30-3:30pm

April 5, Thursday 2:30-3:30pm

April 6, Friday 2:30-3:30pm

April 9, Monday 2:30-3:30pm

April 10, Tuesday 2:30-3:30pm

Place: Conference Hall 104, Science Building

Introduction to Speaker:

Gordon Baym, received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1960, as a student of Julian Schwinger. After spending two years at Niels Bohr’s Institute in Copenhagen, and a year at the University of California, Berkeley, he came to the University of Illinois in 1963, where he has been ever since.

Professor Baym is a theoretical physicist with unusually wide research interests, spanning condensed matter physics and statistical physics, including superfluidity and ultracold atomic physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, and the history of physics. A pioneer in the study of pulsars and neutron stars, and more generally the nature of the matter under extreme conditions of density and pressure, he has been a driver in studies of high-density matter in the laboratory using high-energy particle accelerators to recreate on earth, albeit briefly, the conditions in neutron stars and the early universe. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the National Academy of Sciences; and the American Philosophical Society, he was awarded the Bethe Prize, the Onsager Prize, and recently the Feenberg Medal. He continues service on national and international physics advisory committees, and is the author of two well-known books, "Quantum Statistical Mechanics" (with Leo Kadanoff), and "Lectures on Quantum Mechanics.”